How do you recharge when your well of compassion runs low?

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1 Text: Matthew 5:1-12 Date: May 7, 2017 Title: Happy Are the Sad Theme: It is possible to mourn joyfully, because Christ is himself the fulfillment of the promise blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Question How do you recharge when your well of compassion runs low? Intro Remember that if you ve missed the other sermons in this series, you can always catch up online So far, we ve talked about paradox We ve talked about finding joy and happiness where you d least expect it And we ve talked about making sure our hope is properly placed A lot of challenging stuff so far, I think And today s is equally challenging I want to focus in on verse 3: Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted So why does Jesus call those who mourn blessed? Let s talk about it, but let s pray first. Prayer Sermon Today s lesson is hard. I don t care how you try and cut it: it s not just an unpleasant truth But a hard truth No one gets through life without losing something or someone important to them You don t get to come through this thing without some pain Without some hurt Now I know no one wants to hear that But it s our reality - nothing on this side of heaven is forever 1

2 Many of those losses are beyond our control Others, perhaps even harder for us to accept, are because of things we did good things we had that we ourselves messed up Maybe you haven t been there yet I pray you haven t Or maybe you re in the middle of that right now a loss or a transition you didn t want, that you never asked for, that you hoped to avoid Maybe when Jesus says, Blessed are those who mourn your ears perk up because you say, that s me, that s where I am right now And at the same time you might think to yourself, I don t see how anyone can say this is a blessed place to be Remember how I said, this word blessed could also be translated happy Happy are those who mourn? What sense does that make? How is that even possible? I want to say, first: remember Jesus at the tomb of his friend Lazarus (John 11) Jesus wept may be the shortest verse in the Bible But in those two words we find perhaps the most important lesson that there is The one who pronounces the blessing on our mourning is not disconnected from our mourning Scholars speculate about the reasons why Jesus wept some say that he was weeping over the human condition, over the sadness of Lazarus sisters many reasons But to me, I hold on to the idea that Jesus is just like us That he s not mourning a concept like the human condition, he s genuinely mourning a friend Lazarus was not just an acquaintance, but someone who was very dear to him the whole family was It hurt. Maybe Jesus was feeling in advance the way his friends would feel when HE died And so that loss, short-lived as it was Jesus raised him from the dead, after all still meant something That may be the greatest point of all here Our losses SHOULD mean something to us They SHOULD hurt 2

3 Blessed are those who mourn because they FEEL something There is nothing sadder than being numb to life When we have lost our capacity for mourning, we ve lost something essential to our humanity When I am doing a funeral and I can t feel the pain of that family who have lost a father, or a mother what good am I? Blessed are those who mourn, because they are still human Because they still have the capacity for compassion Now the question is, what will we mourn? Of course, we ll mourn the losses that strike closest to us We can t help that The challenge of following Jesus is learning to mourn with a Mom in Camden who loses her son to a drive by shooting To mourn with a Dad who loses a daughter to drugs To mourn a whole family who dies on a boat in the Mediterranean trying to escape Syria The situations we mourn, and what we don t mourn, say something about who we are We are challenged to have compassion and empathy And yet I believe we, above all people, are also called to joy How can these two things go together? One of my favorite spiritual writers, Richard Rohr, talks about a bright sadness that permeates the spiritual life 1 He talks about it as a deep okayness Which doesn t sound very appealing But it is, when you compare it with the way we often approach loss, okayness is actually not a bad thing Think about people s reactions when you tell them: so-and-so lost her mother when she was in elementary school Or when we think about a bride in her 20s losing her husband in war We say, oh my gosh, and we shake our heads, and we wonder how anyone could get through that That s terrible, we say, and it is 3

4 I have friend whose situation invoked that kind of response in people She lost her husband to cancer when they were in their 40s At the time, her children were still fairly young And it was hard of course it was hard When you meet her today, more than ten years on, you see someone who is determined to make the most out of the life she has To enjoy her kids, to take pride in them To spend time with friends To figure things out There is joy in her life despite this tragedy that s just under surface And it s faith that has made the difference Another way to talk about this bright sadness is to say that we are called to mourn joyfully Some of the most justice-minded people I know people who are deeply concerned with the state of the world and whose wells of compassion always flow freely People who you think might be depressing to be around Are actually some of the most joyful and most enjoyable people to spend time with The key to this bright sadness, this joyful mourning is not shutting ourselves off from compassion or caring Again, when you do that, you become something less than human No, it s about feeling that pain deeply and then turning it over to God I have to believe that Jesus was the most deeply joyful person who ever walked this earth That the reason why he could attract huge crowds while pronouncing things like Blessed are those who mourn It s because he was magnetic He could get away with saying hard things because it wasn t coming from a place of constant doom and gloom though he certainly wasn t blind either to the spiritual state of his people or to the political situation under Roman rule 4

5 He could say the things he said And do the things he did Because he trusted God to comfort his people Because he knew that he was, in fact, sent for this purpose The Beatitude is true because Jesus has stepped into our world We can mourn joyfully because we understand the promise and the gift of eternal life we know about Resurrection Our sadness can be bright because we are assured that God walks with us in every situation no matter how difficult Christ himself is the fulfillment of the promise: Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted Amen. By Joe Monahan, Medford UMC, Medford NJ 1 This is a little flavor of what he means: 5

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